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Theological Problems

Father Frederick C. Copleston (Jesuit Catholic priest) versus Bertrand Russell (agnostic philosopher.) (The portion on “Contingency” is slightly edited.) This debate was a Third Program broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1948. It was reprinted in several sources. Summary Copleston put forward his argument which concentrates simply on contingency. There are things in the […]

John 1,14: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. The incarnation is probably the aspect of Christianity that is hardest to grasp. In the following articles from the third part of the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas explains why this was necessary for the salvation of human beings. God could have saved us in […]

From: W. L. Craig: “Professor Mackie and the Kalām Cosmological Argument,” in: Religious Studies, No. 20 (1985), p. 367. “The kalām cosmological argument, as opposed to the Thomistic and Leibnizian, is one of the better-respected arguments for the existence of God. Because its validity is not controversial, because it aligns with the most prominent scientific […]

Thomas Aquinas claims that the existence of God can be proven in five ways. I will first quote the text from the Summa, and then outline the five arguments. Summa Theologiae, Question 2, Article 3. It seems that God does not exist, for if one of two contrary things were infinite, its opposite would be completely […]

Ontological arguments for the existence of God are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world — e.g., from reason alone. In other words, ontological arguments are arguments from nothing but analytic, a priori and necessary premises to the conclusion […]

Thomas’ most significant work is his Summa theologiae or ‘summary of Theology,’ a gigantic work which attempts to present all of Christian theology as systematically as possible. Thomas worked on it from 1266 through 1273. Then, when he was nearly finished, he underwent an experience so intense that, as he himself explained, everything he had […]